It's been a while

 I don't put the effort into this that I thought I would.  Regardless, I thought I would just say "out loud" that I think Elix...

September 30, 2018

Functional Programming

When I went to college, I was a Computer Science major.  We worked in Pascal 99% of the time.  I remember how we distinguished the two ways of modularizing your Pascal: functions and procedures.  Functions always return something, procedures didn't. 

I don't remember Functional Programming mentioned specifically, but it certainly must have come up in the context of Lisp since we touched on that in a programming languages overview class.  In any case, there has always been this lingering desire to learn more about Functional Programming.

Skipping ahead, life sort of happened, and I never quite got around to it.  Sadly, so many things I wanted could be described like that.  Well, it's time that changed.  I'm making a concerted effort to level up my skills and learn by doing.

Sometime in the last few years, I became aware of the Elixir programming language.  Since I work in Ruby daily, Elixir is a good choice in terms of cognitive overload.  The syntax is approachable and similar enough to Ruby, that I should hopefully think more about the concepts and less about the syntax.

So, that's where I'll be starting.  Truth be told, I've already completed the Koans a couple of times, and have dabbled with a couple of books and video series.  My hope is that writing while I'm learning will help solidify things in my brain.  Daily practice is ideal, but realistically, that sounds very tough to pull off.  I think every other day or so is more likely.  Let's see how this goes!